Why have some older people not adopted Internet?

[SparklyNewMe]

My parents have embraced it naturally somehow, and DM is very active on SM.
PIL have not - similar ages but always scoffed at it as if it was devil’s work. No smartphones. Both were switched on and active in olde age. MIL is on her own now, dependent on DH and BIL for all admin, and simpler things she deals with on her own like finding opening times are harder. But it was 100% choice, not inability, to adopt it, as MIL went to college in her 60s to learn Microsoft Office and has been using Word and Excel for her hobby. But email or internet - dismissed completely.

Yes, I won't use those public QR codes and always use a credit card for buying everything. A bank account is for managing direct debits and other bills, obviously the credit card bill each month, moving money around and paying people, best not being used for purchases.

@AmaryllisNightAndDay

Pensions, investments, P60s... good to have those on paper.

Fine and dandy until it gets lost, stolen, forgotten or damaged in floods/fire, chewed by mice for bedding, coffee spilt on it, etc. I've been an accountant for 40 years and experienced clients who've really struggled and lost money/suffered stress, due to losing paperwork as it's very fragile. Even had to pore through a box of paperwork that a cat had pissed in making it all stuck together and soggy. Paper really isn't a magic bullet!

Neither paper nor electronic record keeping is good enough unless its done properly. I.e. properly organised, directories/folders, fire proof cabinet etc for papers and secure multiple well organised backups for electronic.

The REAL problem is that people don't organise their records properly, neither electronic NOR paperwork. Far too many people just have random boxes/drawers of paperwork all over their house with a warm glow inside thinking how clever they are to keep all their papers, but then suffer an absolute nightmare to sort through it all when it's finally needed decades later (not to mention those who forgot they put a box in the loft of the house they moved away from a couple of decades ago!).

For many people, it becomes more and more difficult to learn new things and to retain that information. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying goes.

But it's a lot easier to learn small changes over a long period of time, rather than put your head in the sand for years and then struggle when you find that you have no choice but to adapt to big changes.

@taxguru Age often involves both accumulation and loss. More things to manage, more history, more things to lose as well. For those of us who aren't tax advisers (etc) maintaining these records is not our main skilllset or interest.

No method is perfect but taking one method which a non-specialist has more or less figured out (barring disasters like fire) and replacing it wholsale by something totally different doesn't make it easier.

And don't knock it - tax advisers can get paid a lot to go through those boxes.

But it's a lot easier to learn small changes over a long period of time, rather than put your head in the sand for years and then struggle when you find that you have no choice but to adapt to big changes.

Up to a point. Being an early adopter may mean going through a period when the technology isn't mature and it's an absolute PITA. There are lots of things that are easy to do now which would have been much harder a few years back.

It’s not just “old” people either. One of my colleagues at work (younger than me and I’m in my fifties) refuses to use the internet other than at work where it’s a requirement. She keeps citing “big brother” as the reason she won’t use the internet for anything other than at work. She grudgingly reads work emails but will walk around the building to verbally answer questions wherever possible rather than reply to the email. She won’t order anything online. Any bills that can’t be paid by cheque she gets her daughter to pay and then gives her daughter a cheque - and was horrified by the “danger” when she then discovered that her daughter paid in the cheques using her phone banking app rather than physically going to the bank. She is absolutely convinced that anything online is going to rob her blind or “infect” anything plugged in - she believes that when her washing machine broke down it was because the manufacturer had sent a “code” to her (not internet enabled) machine rather than the fact that it was old and scaled up.

DH and I are reasonably techy, but HMRC is nightmare. We are trying to pay a CGT bill, in oder to do so you have to have a government gateway account, fine we both did it. However, you then have to prove your identity for the tax man, fine for me who still has a driving license as well as a passport. Not so for him who can no longer drive due to poor eyesight. You have to try and take a photo on your smart phone,which is a nightmare. We sent a whinge to HMRC, they responded, and it turns out that we just have sort out some paperwork, and send it with a cheque! Sometimes things were easier in the old days!

Some of you lot have no clue. I'm in my early 70s - no computers at school, university or in my first jobs (typing, but on an actual typewriter). I then went into a techie type job so all ok from there, but for people of my age who worked in different jobs it's entirely possible they weren't exposed to computers and certainly didn't need them for everyday life.

But for a long time, computers weren't seen as having any place in most people's lives. They were things that were maybe needed at work or by hobbyists, but no ordinary person could have predicted the level of dependency we all now have. It wasn't about putting heads on the sand. Without a crystal ball it simply didn't seem relevant to people. Smartphones and apps were just fantasy. And by the time that any man in the street realised that they were going to need to manage this stuff, the gap was huge.

No-one who grew up with computers in their classroom can begin to understand how alien and difficult they seem to the generations above who had/have to jump in cold.

There's a middle ground between being first in the queue to try the latest "new thing" and ignoring it for a couple of decades till it's too late and you're left behind.

I've been tech savvy since the late 70s but I've never gone gung ho to buy the newest laptop, update to the latest operating system the moment it's released, and as I said above, I've waited over a decade to buy a new car with a touchscreen. There's usually a huge time gap between being an early adopter and falling by the wayside.

Easier for you, maybe, but not easier and massively expensive for HMRC to employ literally tens of thousands of people to open mail, input data manually, etc. The fact that HMRC systems are a nightmare is simply poor programming/tech project management, which will get sorted out in the fullness of time, but like anything government related, it just takes a long time. But before they were so highly computerised, I can assure they were a nightmare to deal with when everything was paper based too!

I would imagine her irrational paranoia extends far beyond computers and IT!

It's ridiculously easy to get a generic email address, i.e. badbadbunny at gmail.com and send/receive emails via a smart phone. You really don't need to work somewhere where they issue you with a works one - and shouldn't be using a works email for personal use anyway.

Many lorry drivers need a smart phone to communicate with their control room, check traffic/weather updates, and even get their delivery confirmations signed on their smart phone screen by the sender/receiver.

Problem is that some people seem not to realise that things like email, phone satnav, digital radio, face book, etc IS the internet - I've seen many posts on social media saying things like "I don't do the internet" yet have actually posted on Facebook via the internet!

Hopefully you awful judgemental types will be old some day soon. Then you will understand.

We had computers in the house in the 90s. DM even had a mobile phone in the mid-90s and foisted one on me in '98 when I was in sixth form. That was her technological peak. She refused to learn to send/ read texts, and computers and the internet were a newfangled fad that would disappear soon.

She's a proud luddite. She has nothing to do with the internet and conveniently overlooks the amount of outsourcing that causes to her friends and DB.
I wish she had learned to text because land lines aren't so handy when you're deaf, and arthritic so struggle to get to it if you even heard it. That affects our relationship as I'm not local so it's a major barrier to staying in touch.

Her peers have kept pace with functional technology, and she did have opportunities to be guided through in her 50s and 60s. She's too far down Luddite Street now, but it was an active choice to go down that route.

@Flossflower no, Stafford Poly as was.

I'm the same. I'm much more proficient in computer use than my friends are, but I just can't be bothered with apps. I have two or three I use, and have disabled most of the others. I use my phone to text mainly, and that's not often either. I simply can't be bothered using a small screen to look at things.

I have three different age groups to comment on.

my DP’s are mid/late 80’s. My dad used a laptop reasonably well but can’t fathom cloud storage and smart phones. Despite working in a progressive tech environment! He just can’t get his head around it and I’ve had lots of panicked phone calls over the “where have my photos gone?!” (loaded to the laptop from an elderly digital camera). But to his credit, he manages the dreaded online Dr appointments and online banking. He would far rather go to the bank and see someone though. My DM struggles with a push button phone. In fact when I ring them on Saturday, she answered the phone with “what button do I press <DF name>?” .. so she’d actually already managed to pick up the call. She has never even turned a laptop on and still refers to a calculator as an “adding machine”.

I agree with other comments about confidence in the older generation. They are constantly being told. “Be careful”, “don’t do” and other things that now I genuinely think it’s just a case of they just don’t trust anything.

Now, I’m 50. I use computers all the time, love technology and the house is full of it as a result. I write macros for excel and I tend to be the person at work that gets asked “how do you do….”.

But, buying online train tickets from the Trainline app completely baffles me!! I can’t do it and frankly I get quite stressed and anxious when I need to travel by train and I think there won’t be someone in the ticket office. I took my son and his friend to London for the day, wanted travel cards for the three of us, got the order wrong and ended up with 32 separate tickets! I hate it!

My DS is 13. He’s got all the gadgets because this house has them. He’s got his own email and manages his own online shopping and online accounts (including gaming). He thought that email was just for password resetting! When someone from the club he goes to was contacting him to get in touch he had absolutely no clue how to respond or what to do with the email so just ignored it. It was an important email as it was to do with starting DofE.

my conclusions are that we all have our difficulties with the technology as it is today. What is very logical and intuitive to one person, isn’t necessarily the same for someone else.

I hope I manage to keep up with tech. but as the arthritis in my hands and feet progress, whose to say I will be as able as I am today.

Incidentally, my DF got quite good with the Meta Quest VR when he had a go last Christmas! And I have a photo on my iPhone that makes me chuckle as a result - something I will treasure!

and many Betamax videos, laser disks, mp3 players, amstrad word processors later...

some small changes never get to big change status, most become obsolete...

You get fed up of investing time and money into the next thing in the hope of keeping up... long term, way down the line ... are we going for electric cars, or hydrogen fuel cells, or something else entirely... whilst people hold on to their petrol and diesel because they are "better" at the particular job they are needed for ( a to b, any distance, any conditions, easily/speedily fueled) Why learn something new if it is not going to be THE something new that persists

i find many older people think it will be “too hard” to learn. The language is confusing at first, and how do you remember the difference between internet and email?

possibly because when computers started up it was much more niche, you needed programming skills and an actual understanding of how it all worked. FTP protocols, dial up, peer to peer, it was all quite specialised.

while the younger generation have grown up with more advanced interfaces that are simple to use, the older generation are still thinking they need to know about IP addresses and the like. I find I am much more knowledgeable than my kids because I understand the underlying tech, rather than just using it. So it’s me they need to fix things, set up things etc.

like someone explaining how to rewire a plug. It’s simple, but many are scared to do it because they’re worried they’ll get the live wire mixed up with the earth, and what if they get it wrong?

Brain damage.

Both my parents were well up to speed with internet essentials like email, shopping, video calling, using mobile phones, etc in their 80s. Both had strokes.

After a stroke, your brain has to make new pathways for stuff like walking, knowing when to pee, eating and swallowing. You also have to re-learn a whole bunch of things from (depending on the stroke) how to talk to using the washing machine. This is exhausting and leaves no space for extras.

The tech usage is a recent skill compared to the other ones, and far less necessary to survival. Some stroke survivors can get some of it back - my mum did after a couple of vey minor strokes - but it's not at all surprising that it never makes a full recovery.

What is surprising is how rarely discussions about elderly tech exclusion take this into account! Mini-strokes are extremely common in old age, often undiagnosed but always removing a little bit of knowledge. It's all very well saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks", but most "old dogs" are having to re-learn their old tricks on a regular basis.

I’ve had the internet since I was a child when it was dial up but even I feel annoyed reading some of these ageist comments. I’m curious how some older people are introduced to tech by younger people. Are they going to see it from the older person’s pov or roll their eyes because they don’t get something that seems basic to the internet user?

Also it’s easy with hindsight to see how necessary the internet would become but it wasn’t back then to a lot of people.

Something being around doesn’t mean that everyone would have the same opportunities. I couldn’t find time to go on a course just now. I have a full time job and a family.

Because people much older than them are evolving so why couldn't they?

Why can some people learn six languages while others can barely speak one? Because everybody has different capabilities.